


shake your graveclothes off

by prettydizzeed



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Amnesia, Character Study, Disability, Gen, Trans Male Character, canon-typical general unpleasant apocalypse stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-18 19:26:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28997472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prettydizzeed/pseuds/prettydizzeed
Summary: In a different century, this sort of thing would’ve meant you were a god, or at least a miracle. As it is, you’re just a guy with his own grave dirt under his nails.
Relationships: Male Courier & Doc Mitchell, Male Courier/Arcade Gannon
Kudos: 21





	shake your graveclothes off

**Author's Note:**

  * For [arekiras](https://archiveofourown.org/users/arekiras/gifts).



> i miss watching my best friend play video games so i wrote a fic about faer oc
> 
> title from graveclothes by birdtalker

In a different century, this sort of thing would’ve meant you were a god, or at least a miracle. As it is, you’re just a guy with his own grave dirt under his nails.

(It wasn’t exactly a priority, scrubbing it out. Taking a bath from a bucket at the Doc’s place, you were too preoccupied learning all the scars you can’t remember, rinsing the ointment out of your hair near the shaved section. The Doc has a clean razor, and you wet and soap your hair again in front of a cracked mirror, shave enough to make it look intentional. You take a stubborn pair of scissors to the rest, and if your hands shake so bad you drop them a couple times, well, at least they can’t do any damage.)

(You don’t need to bother with shaving your face, at least. The Doc must’ve done it at least once while you were out, and it grows slow enough you won’t need to again any time soon. You can’t trace back the thread of how you know that, just feel it in your gut and the pads of your fingers.)

The Doc has some needles, too, is trying to get some sort of exchange program started so people are only at risk of dying from the drugs themselves and not the stuff they use to take them. He teaches you how to sterilize them with a lighter and where to stick yourself in the thigh. “Hope I’m not being presumptuous,” he says, nodding to you in a comfortable sort of way. “It isn’t really my business, I know. But I’ve spent long enough in a body with similar needs to have figured a few things out, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind you of them.”

Maybe there’s a muscle memory of the movement, somewhere down where the atrophy hasn’t reached. Maybe not. Either way, it feels right, like a relief.

The first time you have to use the gun, you’re nowhere near on target. The sound reminds you of dying. So really, even in a wasteland where people who know more about you than you do could be waiting behind any weathered face to take your life, it can only get better from here, right?

You cut your nails down with a knife, careful not to nick the soft skin there even when it means stopping every few seconds to wait out the shaking, but the shadow at the edges of your fingers stays, like a bruise or a tattoo, like the haziness at the edges of your vision that makes you wonder how much dust found its way inside your skull. Some men carry their tombs around with them, you figure. 

(One day, you’ll meet a man who’ll later insist on resting his palms on either side of your head, pressing his thumbs in, checking where it hurts and how well your eyes can pick out different shapes on a board.  _ “Ecce quem amas infirmatur,” _ he’ll murmur to himself, and take your trembling hand in his and kiss the wrist he has just cleaned.)

You blink heavily under the sepia sky and take another step forward. Everything here is a shell of what it used to be. Maybe that’s what it means to survive. 

**Author's Note:**

> i rly don’t go here lol but i’m on tumblr @campgender if you wanna say hi!
> 
> the phrase Arcade says in Latin translates to “he whom thou lovest is ill,” a verse from the Bible spoken to Jesus about Lazarus (who Jesus then raises from the dead) because we all know i can’t resist some homoerotic biblical symbolism


End file.
